Blot out the Stars
by estuesday
Summary: After the war, Albus copes.


Notes: Set after the Great War, this is a sort-of companion piece to a fic that will be posted in roughly a week or so. Thank you to my beta, **uminohikari**.

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It starts with socks.

The first few years, Albus can't bring himself to forgive Gellert, or even himself. He's distracted, moody. The wizarding world is calling him a hero and has conveniently forgotten that Albus let Gellert's reign of terror continue for years without confrontation. There are honor banquets and interviews and requests for help with research.

Even with so much to do, Albus finds the nights too long, lying on the left side of his bed and watching the ceiling. He charms it to show the sky, once, but it reminds him too much of shared summer nights spent cataloging the stars and discussing philosophy and experimental charms. He remembers the prickle of grass against his robes and how it contrasted with the smooth fingers teasing their way in, only to withdraw seconds later, flirting and shy. After three sleepless nights, he changes the ceiling back to white and dreams of painting over the sky, blotting out Orion and covering over the moon. He considers dreamless sleep potion, but that way lays addiction and madness.

At Flamel's suggestion, he takes up knitting. He begins with socks--one can never have enough socks. At first, it's a distraction, learning how to keep the legs even, end the toes. It takes him seven tries to succeed at the bend of the heel, and twelve to perfect it. Eventually, it's a comfort, the clack-clack of the needles lulling him into a sort of trance, resting without sleep or dreams. There are only the needles and the yarn, and though it's not enough, will never be enough, it's survivable.

The socks start piling up. He sends some to Aberforth first. Two months later, Aberforth finally replies to Albus's letters and packages with a terse note: "Stop sending me socks." The bottom of the mostly blank page reads, "P.S. Still not speaking to you."

Albus starts giving some to friends for birthdays and Christmas. After a year of this, Flamel gently suggests that maybe Albus might want to branch out into scarves and hats, and might keep a few for himself this time. Albus doesn't mention how they pile up in drawers and crowd his robes out of his closet onto hangers that float around his rooms like perpetually disturbed pigeons. He starts making hats. At least hats do not demand matching pairs, one of which inevitably becomes irrevocably lost in the wash or in the night, mismatched singles huddling together in the corners of drawers like frightened house elves.

Hats aren't the same. They come out lopsided or too large, rendering even the most fashionable wizard ridiculous-looking. The long brims flop over heads and eyes, and their mere appearance antagonizes the sorting hat.

He finds patterns for long, looping scarves with swirls and criss-crosses and stripes. Scarves are nice, but he's never quite sure where to stop, and changing the colors is too distracting. It's hard to find that soothing place where thought consists only of needles and yarn. He tries to give a scarf, an emerald, puce, and pastel blue piece that stretches seventeen feet, to the headmaster. Albus is then categorically and unquestionably forbidden from gifting any more to anyone at Hogwarts ever, for the entirety of Dippet's academic reign. Three students purportedly steal the scarf from the office, where after it disappears into Hogwarts myth and legend.

Time passes. The paper stops discussing Gellert as much. The interview requests taper down to once every few weeks, and become about more than the Great War and Albus's part in it.

Aberforth sends an owl, the only message, "Business is slow." Albus folds it gently into a treatise on squib rights he bought a (long) short time ago. Twelve socks, three lopsided hats, and a fourteen foot scarf later, Albus drops by Aberforth's pub, trying for casual.

"I brought you a scarf." Aberforth looks less than pleased. They don't talk much, but sit at the counter with two butterbeers and a noisy silence. Aberforth keeps leaving to tend to customers. The windows darken, the last customer leaves, and finally Albus gives in, opens his mouth. "I never meant for it to happen that way."

Aberforth's eyes are dark, burning holes to a place Albus never wants to visit again. "And how did you mean it to?"

Albus has no answers.

He returns home to a cold bed. He tries to sleep in the middle this time, this once. The ceiling is especially white, and he wonders if the charm has somehow kept working, cleaning, clearing away all the dust and dirt and grime. The window lets light trickle in, and he slips out of the sheets almost gratefully.

A journalist accidentally switches two names in the Prophet's by-lines, and that morning Albus spills hot tea all over himself and the paper. He owls Germany and is assured that Geller--Grindelwald is still locked up safe and sound. The dead prisoner is an English wizard; the Germans aren't so barbaric they would use dementors for executions. Grindelwald will live a long time to contemplate his crimes. A very, very long time, Albus reassures himself.

Albus visits Aberforth a few times in his pub, making approving noises over the new curtains and tutting over the state of the floor. On the third visit, Aberforth stops him before he can rearrange some of the decorations or clean the bar again, taking away his wand and pressing into his hands a pair of needles and a spool of yarn.

"Quit mucking up the atmosphere and make yourself useful," Aberforth says, voice gruff, not meeting his eyes. It feels like something's cracked and bleeding in Albus's chest, welling up his throat, into his eyes. The resultant hat, a deep umber, is a little less lopsided than usual. Aberforth mutters something about Albus improving, and settles it over his head on his way out.

Albus feels his lips curl up at the corners into the beginnings of a smile and carefully reaches up to adjust the hat, sweeps it up so Aberforth's left eye is visible once more.

"Thank you."

"S'your hat. You made it," Aberforth mumbles.

Albus doesn't disagree.

That night he dreams of ash floating on the wind, the taste lying heavy on his tongue. "Why?" he asks it.

"It was necessary," the wind answers.

His hand is curled on the right pillow when he wakes, as though reaching for something.

Albus starts his day with a sweater. It comes out like a joint project between a deranged lobster and fussy house elf. There are three arms and no neck holes. The wool is likely unsalvageable.

Two owls are staring daggers of intent at the wisps of beard reaching past his Adam's apple when he finally opens the window. One leaves behind its missive and a message of its own, smeared down the envelope. The other bites threateningly at his finger until Albus feeds it a slice of cold bacon. He tries to scratch it under its beak, but it flies off, haughty and offended.

Three days later, he's in Germany, dizzy from the portkey and holding back bile by sheer force of will. He barely needs to flash his passport before they're ushering him out of the courtyard and into the building. He stays a week before Hogwarts duties call him back.

Flamel owls him asking if he won't reconsider taking the Minister post, even just briefly. Albus doesn't respond that he can't help but wonder what good it is being the most powerful wizard of his generation if he can't change anything that truly matters. He sends a twenty-foot green scarf he'd kept bundled away--with five other scarves of similar length and fifteen failed sweaters--in the bottom drawer of (Ari's) an old bureau. Flamel's next letter assures Albus that he will be quite warm that winter, and goes on to inquire about Albus's current headway with the dragon's blood samples he'd sent a few weeks before. A sudden breakthrough dominates their correspondence for the next year.

After returning from Germany on the second visit, Albus spends five weeks, staring mostly at the slow cracking of the white paint of the ceiling, before he picks up the needles again. He knits a sturdy pair of plain grey socks and resolutely doesn't think of to whom he will send them. He chooses the softest, plushest yarn he can and knits the socks extra-thick. The results are warm and heavy in his hands.

He spends ten minutes staring at the small wrapped box and three attached letters. The owl, a ruffled, mud-specked brown bird of indeterminate age from Hogwarts's owlery, hoots at him disapprovingly before he finally hands the package over into its care.

There are three responses. The president writes several meandering, verbose pages, in which he says nothing of importance. The tone is carefully neutral. The head of the prison writes two pages of warnings and permissions. The third letter states only, "You shouldn't have."

Albus forgoes knitting that night, instead holding the parchment between trembling hands and smoothing it down again and again, eyes closed. The letter smells only of ink and cheap parchment, rough under his fingertips. That night, the ceiling watches unheeded as his lips curl and one hand reaches up to cover his face. Light creeps in like an intruder. Albus's ankles crack like a man grown ancient when he stands to tidy the correspondence away.

"I don't think it's healthy," Flamel says, couched in the middle of a letter mostly addressing the upcoming conference.

"I have my students and research. What more does one need?" Albus responds. Albus does not include the light violet mittens he has just finished--McGonogall's birthday is coming up, and the moratorium on gifts has been lifted since he's consistently produced five fingered gloves and a young Gryffindor gave him tips on the sweaters. He digs up a pair of thin, peach socks Flamel's wife might like, suitable for a warm summer evening, and folds them gently into the envelope.

Flamel states simply that he will see Albus at the conference, and encloses a spool of brilliant gold thread, a subtle rejoinder that Albus might branch out into other endeavors. Albus doesn't flinch at the color, merely places it in the top drawer with an old wand and cloak, sighing softly as he shuts the drawer.

They speak only of their research, but Aberforth calls on him after. Albus opens the door with something like surprise, something like resignation. "You haven't been around," Aberforth says in a tone that for him is mild.

Albus smiles sadly. "I'm always around."

Aberforth comes in and they drink two pots of tea. He steals the pair of socks on the table on the way out. Albus doesn't point out that he has twelve more and another mostly finished in the bedroom. They don't hug goodbye.

The owls don't come more often no matter how much he writes. Flamel waits for clear results. Aberforth doesn't write at all anymore, unless Albus stops. The updates from Germany are sent once a month, the first Mondays, with the occasional letter bundled in. Albus starts a knitting circle that meets Monday evenings, and though he and two shy, young redheads are the only regulars, he is sure to be punctual and stay the full time. Afterward, he patrols with other professors until midnight.

Sometimes he lasts until the weekend, waking early Saturday and spending the time before breakfast reading and re-reading, committing words and letters and stray ink blotches to memory. Other times, he has the house elves bring him tea and biscuits on Tuesday and forgoes breakfast in the Great Hall in favor of staying in an overstuffed chair and letting his tea go cold as he hunches gracelessly over his mail. He'll remain this way--breathing in the scent of paper and ink and owl, letting something like pain, something like hope wash over him, feeling like nothing so much as a besotted second year--until he has to dash off to class.

The years pass this way. Months flit by like chapters in a book Albus is trying to make last, because there's hope so long as he doesn't know the end, so long as he doesn't read the last words printed in bold ink telling him it's time to stop, that there's nothing left now. Albus presses his attention firmly to each word, each letter, each rough shadow in the fiber of the page; he immerses himself in his teaching, in his research, in the conventions and committees that infiltrate deeper and deeper into his life. The ceiling's blank stare unnerves him a little less each night, the needles' call comes a little less strongly. He can almost tell himself he's fine when the next letter comes, can almost pretend he's not smothering under the weight of his duties and the daily life he'd never imagined for himself at eighteen when he'd stared into endless blue and saw the possibilities unfold before him with wonder, like staring at a new journal's first welcoming blank pages.

But the truth is that Albus is fooling no one who truly knows him, not even himself, not even Gellert in all his carefully worded missives. They've known the way this will end for years, and Gellert's too ruthlessly kind to allow him to believe differently.

It's not the last letter, not by far, but it's the first that Gellert lays it out for him, his last words on an argument that had never ended, only upped in stakes and consequences. Albus lays the letter carefully, carefully back down on the table, smooths its bent corners and crumpled body to something resembling its original flat shape. He moves back to the tea tray, lifts the still steaming cup, and takes his first sip, tea sloshing all over his hands. It burns his fingers, and he places it gently on the floor in its puddle. The teapot is hotter than the cup, heavier in his hands. The porcelain makes a satisfying crashing sound against the wall. The brass of the tray rebounds and clangs hard against the floor.

Before he can move on to anything else, a house elf appears, trembling before him. "Does Master Dumbledore require anything?"

Albus's control of his hands hasn't fully returned to him, but his voice is surprisingly steady as he answers, "Nothing. Everything is fine."

He waits until the house elf has gone to clean up the mess. The tidy up spell he'd often used as a teenager takes three tries to get right, turning the paint of the walls a vivid orange, before it manages to properly take hold. Another spell, the same as on the ceiling, and the walls are fixed. Albus doesn't worry about the glare of the walls turned white once more. It's preferable to the last lines of the letter burnt into memory. At least white doesn't hold the hope of blue.

Once, when Albus was fifteen he'd wanted nothing more to escape. He'd taken his father's old broom and aimed up, ever up, chasing the stars. The heat of summer had faded into a chill wind that cut at his exposed hands and face. The higher he went, the more the cold gnawed at his bones and skin. His breath came short and quick, and the stars came no closer. His magic failed when he'd gone higher than mountains, higher than the clouds passing silent under his feet, and he'd fallen just as quickly as he'd shot up into the sky, full of hope and anger and terrible joy.

Albus had known all along that his dreams were nothing more than ash swept from his hands by a high wind, and now was the time for him to accept it, to lie down and look up at the stars burning out one by one in the cold night sky.

Albus burns the letter, burns all of the letters, and then throws in the gold thread, watching it unspool mid-air and glint like strands of hair before the fire consumes it. After that follow several unfinished projects, yarn taking an extra few seconds to spark and then burn. The crackle of the fire is Gellert's voice, whispering in his ear:

"My methods may have left something to be desired," and that's not remorse, nothing like remorse, though Albus wishes he couldn't hear the ever present notes of fondness and rationality, "but I wasn't wrong."

The fire dies. The knitting needles go in Ariana's drawer. Albus sleeps in a too large bed and pretends he can't remember his dreams. The house elves have cleaned out the larger debris from the fireplace. The ashes, as ever, remain. It's just another day. Just another day. Albus wonders if he repeats it often enough, if he might ever fool himself again.


End file.
